Many travelers enjoy sending postcards to friends and family to let those they care about know that they are thinking about them. Often, these postcards show something about the place that the sender is visiting so that the recipient of the postcard can share in the feeling of being in a beautiful, historic or meaningful location.
The use of traditional postcards has decreased consistently since 1980. There are a number of reasons for this on-going decline—traditional postcards are often costly and time-consuming, particularly if there are many recipients. Mailed postcards can take significant time to reach their destination, especially if the place where they are being sent from is distant. Sometimes, the sender has already returned from her trip before the postcard arrives home. Mailing a postcard requires a fair amount of effort—the sender has to buy the card, handwrite a message, find and affix stamps and finally find a post office or mailbox. These difficulties only increase when traveling abroad.
Electronic communication has provided new ways to communicate greetings and short messages that have typically been sent on cards such as greeting cards and postcards. A number of vendors previously maintained apps or websites that enabled a person to create and send an electronic “greeting card” via e-mail. Such websites provide a plurality of “cards” each having graphics and an associated message to which the sender can add a typed personal message.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,343,386 shows an apparatus housed in a booth for producing printed postcards incorporating a self-portrait of the sender in front of one of several optional pictorial backgrounds. A cash-receiving device, a video camera, a monitor and background selection buttons are connected to a computer that controls the operation of the apparatus.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,587,740 shows a kiosk equipped with a digital camera for taking a photograph of a client in front of a scenic attraction. The kiosk also includes a computer, a credit card reader, a telephone connection and a color printer.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,018,774 shows a system for creating an electronic postcard incorporating a client supplied image and optional text, such as a handwritten message, and sending a notification with an identifier to a recipient. The recipient must access a server with the identifier to view and print the postcard.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,161,131 and the related U.S. Pat. No. 6,370,568 show an apparatus for creating a digital postcard and sending the postcard to a recipient via the Internet. The apparatus includes a digital camera for generating an image that is combined with a selected postcard template including geographical information overlaid on the image.
More recently, particularly since the advent of the cell phone, these apps or websites have become far more sophisticated. Sites such as Pinterest® and Facebook® allow you to efficiently display and/or send your own photos. Over 1.4 billion photos are taken each day using cell phones, with approximately 638 million photos being posted each day on social media sites such as Facebook®. In fact, Facebook® now stores ten thousand times as many photos as the Library of Congress.
The overarching problem with all the foregoing systems and methods has been the quality of the photography. The earlier methods frequently utilized digital cameras, but no matter how sophisticated the camera, in the hands of an amateur, amateur pictures will result. This is exacerbated in cell phone photography—not only are the photos still being taken by amateurs, but the camera itself is inferior.